It's slightly disconcerting to hear the name of your company on NPR in the morning. I half expected to see the telling red light indicating a waiting message, or that within seconds of sitting down at my desk I'd be on the phone jumping through verbal hoops; but alas, I'm just not that important. Over the weekend C. and I chatted with a good friend of hers who was working on a new product which would hopefully improve security around the nation's ports. I asked, who's going to pay for it? She said, the shipping lines, the ports. I asked, why would they want to pay for it? She replied, we're working on some legislation to make it mandatory. Ah. Somehow it seems rather shady to me to create a product and then forcing it on the people who have to pay for it. But I guess this wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
On the drive in the other day, NPR was doing a report on the current Aga Khan, a prominent muslim leader. He said something to the effect that the conflicts that we see in the world today are not religious conflicts, but political conflicts. This struck me. I think of many of the problems in the world today as being cause by religious fanatics. Islamofacist, this is the world that the administration coined to avoid alienating certain groups while firmly categorizing, "the enemy." Maybe I've gotten too caught up in what the news is and stopped thinking critically about what is news. The truth is that we are nations in conflict and religion is just a tool to polarize the respective populaces.
For better or worse, I've started thinking of all these different things in terms of marketing. Creating a product and federally mandating its use? Marketing. Starting a war and creating support for it? Marketing. Creating an artificial scarcity of a mineral, calling it a woman's best friend and recommending 2-3 months salary for one? You'd better believe that's marketing.
For some reason C.'s nephew prefers to be held by men. Maybe it's male bonding or maybe it's the fact that his father works at home and gets to see him more often than his mother. Whatever the reason, he comes running to me instead of C. Sometimes when I'm holding him I think of how I might have been some thirty years ago, in my father's arms, a delightful nuisance.
I found myself wonder if selfishness can extend beyond oneself. Is there much difference in wanting something for yourself as compared to wanting something for your family? Is pride in one's community or state or country just a larger form of selfishness? I think that perhaps true altruism can only be found between perfect strangers.
Every year now I've gone to one or two weddings of family friends. There I get to laugh and talk with uncles and aunts who visited when I was still a crying babe, their sons and daughters, and now those children's children. For all the troubles that we've had in the world during the last five years, I think that my father would have liked to have seen this all of this. Sometimes I look over at my mother's table and see the absence there.
There are so many names my father never learned. So many new faces that he never had the opportunity to meet. Our group has grown by birth and by marriage and I wish that he had been there to witness each of these. But mostly, I wish he was around to meet his future daughter-in-law.
Five years later and now New York holds a different place in my heart. I mourned her then, but I miss her now. I don't think of the twin towers like legs of a giant towering above me, I think of the gaping hole in the ground and people gathered round to pay homage. Five years later and I'm still missing him, wishing that I had done more, said more in the twenty five years that I had him, said more in the five years that have passed.
I'm really not sure what to make of the world now. I think back to the way it was. I was naive; perhaps we all were. But it seems like there's more hate, more violence, more war, and more worry. Part of it is that we are more aware. Part of it is that the tools we have are more powerful. But for all of that, I wonder, are we any wiser? Or are we as naive as ever?
I'm not sure where we go from here, if we trust in the direction we are being led, or if we should strike out in a new direction. I here tale of friends of friends leaving the country, moving somewhere nicer. Used to be there was nowhere nicer than here. Times change. I'm not sure of much at all, but I have hope. Five years later and that's what's changed. Used to be I was cynical about everything: politics, works, love; that it didn't matter what I did, the world was going to hell in a hand basket. Maybe that's still true. But I think that you go father hoping for things to get better than expecting things to get worse. So I'm going to hope. Five years from now things will be better. Count on it.